


Learning To Breathe

by CalamityCain



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Angst, Feels, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-16
Updated: 2012-11-16
Packaged: 2017-11-18 19:39:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/564549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CalamityCain/pseuds/CalamityCain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After his fall from the Bifrost, Loki lands on earth and into the life of an urban mortal, with only the vaguest memories of his former life. Memories that grow stronger when the sky thunders. Those are also the days that hurt the most.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the one he left behind searches on for him...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. When The Sky Howls

_**.EARTH** _

 

It rains, but only on his doorstep.

 

There is a gap where someone else should be. Instead there is only thunder. He leans into the windowglass and lets the cold seep back into his veins with nothing to warm them. The coffee on his comfortless glass desk has turned cold; the last of its heat has spurned him. So he looks instead to the sky.

 

If he listens closely, he can hear it howl.

 

Each day ends in an unanswered question. Each morning dawns cool and empty.

 

He tries to carry the sun in the palm of his hands. He tries to recall the many reasons the grass is dull and the ground is hard. Tries to recall why his lungs keep pulling in the taste of a wind that never comes.

 

He tells himself to keep breathing.

 

When he sleeps, his dreams are grey. Save for when they are blue. There is blue on his fingers; blue on his lips. Blue fills him to the brim with frost-tinged whispers of lightless adventures and skin against skin, cradled by Myrkwood damp and dark where secrets go to hide.

 

Sometimes, he dreams in gold. Gold, spilt on icy shoulders. Gold abundant as the endless robes of Sól. A warmth that would fill the empty corners, fill him till fire and ice were one, and even now paints hazy pictures of days that surely once were real.

 

But the pictures are never complete. A light sleeper, he fails to hold on to slumber long enough to find the answers in that phantom touch, that phantom warmth.

 

Another cool morning. Another question that dies on the edge of his lips as he wakes.

 

There are only clouds now. Bringers of new dreams in shades of uru-silver grey, heavy with a promise yet to be kept: a voice in the wind, a song in the air.

 

Someday, the clouds will bring something more. They will sprout limbs and bones and sun-kissed hair. They will fill him until he overflows; until he is whole; until his lungs cease to ache from breathing empty air.

 

It is raining again.

 

It only rains when he remembers.

 

It is cold when he recalls what warmth used to be.

 

It thunders when the days grow long and empty, and his heart begins to howl without knowing why.

 


	2. As The Earth Darkens

_**.ABOVE** _

 

In the land of the gods, there is no need for rain. So the bringer of thunder pours his sorrow onto a clouded earth instead.

 

Never in all his millennia of life has he been so careless with his gifts as to make of them curses. Never has he felt the urge to ride the lightning and tear apart the stratosphere with cries of the one he yearns for; the one who has ever been at his side until now.

 

His sly sibling. His shadow-self. The moon-like glimmer without which he is but a dying sun.

 

When the nights grow long and the lamp-flicker throws lonely streaks on the wall, he will bury his fingers and face in the fur pelt where they used to tangle. He will pull the scent of musk and leather and scorching spell-trails into his every pore. And he will howl when he knows these scents to be imagined.

 

Once, Loki had lost the battle for his wolfchild Fenrir. The beast was taken from him and his then-mate Angrboda, and chained up worlds below where he could be heard but could not be reached. On nights such as these, Thor hears the haunting cry of Fenrir, now grown great and grizzled. He hears his own crying intertwine with that of the direwolf. It is a song that goes on for hours.

 

He wears his beloved’s symbol on his vambraces in mourning. He wears the traces of his tears on his proud warrior’s face. Let all know that Thor the thunderer walks with a heart as heavy as the grey clouds he taints the mortal sky with.

 

Let them know the terrible might of his love, and dare to challenge it. (None do.)

 

The burden does not weaken him. Grief is etched upon his face, but if anything, he is stronger than ever. Each blow of the fearsome Mjolnir is as needle-sharp as it is strong. He rushes into battle still, but only after deliberation. It seems the careless boyishness that was always such part of his rakish, troublesome charm has dimmed; and in its place is an older, wiser being.

 

Thor would have chosen any other path to wisdom. But even gods cannot always choose.

 

He speaks of Loki to no one. The name is a whisper that falls only between his lips and the bed where they used to lie in the refuge of each other’s arms.

 

He searches, but asks the aid of none. His hunt is a lonely one that slides into the secret corners of Yggdrasil’s boughs, each one bringing him just a little further past the void where his beloved fell, and what lies beyond.

 

Someday he will break through the barriers that divide them.

 

Someday, he will storm the earth in search of the one who can complete him.

 

And when he finds what his lungs ache for, the rain will lose its sting, and the wind will become a sweet uru-silver song that breaks the gloom of his grey-skied earth.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When The Sky Howls _and_ As The Earth Darkens _was originally posted as two separate 'counterpart' fics on my tumblr. But they were always meant to be together; and I'm uniting them now, at last._

**Author's Note:**

> _[PERSONAL]_   
> _I realized belatedly that the sensations I wrote about — the empty breathing, the howling inside — seemed to also describe my periods of depression. Pockets of grey and pools of darkness that pull you in until they taint everything good in your life and make of the days a joyless succession._


End file.
